According to Louvinia's account of the Union troop's attempt to capture John Sartoris at home, this "Yankee" - as she repeatedly calls him, without a qualifying article: "Yankee say," "Yankee stood," etc. - realizes just too late that he's been fooled (73).
The commander of the Union troop that comes to Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John Sartoris appears first in Will Falls' account of the event in Flags in the Dust, and then again in Louvinia's slightly different account of the same event in both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished.
The "Yankee officer"in command of the troop that comes to Sartoris hoping to capture John Sartoris - as Will Falls notes in his account of the incident - realizes just too late that he's been fooled (21).
The metal detector salesman works out of Memphis, but the company he works for has its offices "up there in Saint Louis" (79) - which is how the novel spells the city that is usually spelled (and is spelled in Faulkner's earlier story "Gold Is Not Always," where the salesman and the metal detector first appear) 'St. Louis.'
The specific chain gang that Mink works on while at Parchman's in The Mansion consists of eleven men altogether, who go to and from the "mess hall to eat" and the cotton field where they are forced to work "shackled to the same chain" (105). The three who are named - Mink himself, Stillwell and Barron - are all white, and they live inside the penitentiary in "a detached wire-and-canvas-and-plank hut," so it seems safe to assume that in the segregrated South, all eleven are white, but that is an assumption. The gang tries to kill Mink after he objects to their plan to escape.
The five other black men in the county jail where Lucas is held in Intruder in the Dust are described by the narrative as the "crap-shooters and whiskey-peddlers and razor-throwers" who are kept in a single large room on the second floor (30). Some of these Negro prisoners are assigned to what the narrative calls the "street gang" that works outside the jail maintaining town property (54).
In The Hamlet the black prisoners in the Jefferson jail that holds Mink Snopes are described as "the negro victims of a thousand petty white man's misdemeanors" (285). At night they "eat and sleep together" in the jail's "common room"; during the day they work outside on a chain gang, once a familiar feature of the southern penal system. They are described from Mink's point of view, as "a disorderly clump of heads in battered hats and caps and bodies in battered overalls and broken shoes" (285).
This is the train brakeman in "Monk" who sees an accomplice help Bill Terrel carry a body through the bushes and "fling it under the train" (59). Although he's clearly observant, the brakeman could not tell if the victim was dead or alive at the time.
In "Wash" these enslaved black men laugh at Wash for remaining in Yoknapatawpha during the Civil War. They would make fun of him with the question "Why ain't you at de war, white man?" (537). "Most" of Sutpen's slaves leave to follow the Union army toward freedom after "Sherman passes through the plantation" (537).
